Texas to the SEC. USC to the Big Ten. Stanford to the ACC. Pac-12 down to two schools. Following a landslide of conference realignment announcements by the NCAA, all of this will be true in the next couple of years. Most of these changes are happening to the Power Five conferences: the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and Southeastern Conference. While some of the changes, such as BYU, Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF joining the Big 12, have been applied to the 2023 season, most of the realignments will go into effect starting in 2024.

Schools are moving to conferences that are geographically centered thousands of miles from them, increasing travel time for both players and fans. From a fan perspective, it will be a lot less feasible to go to away games if it means a four or five-hour flight instead of a one to two-hour one, like how Stanford’s furthest games will now be 3,126 miles away instead of the 1,284 miles it currently is. In a setting where having a fanbase present is important, this will impact the atmosphere of games.

Sophomore Julia Copas is an avid college football fan. She said that changes to the conference alignments aren’t a good idea because of the strain it puts on fans who want to experience away games but can’t because of the distance.

“There will definitely be less people who are there for those away teams,” Copas said. “It’s like, ‘I did buy season tickets, but I’m not going to travel all the way across the country for a weekend just for a football game like I have work tomorrow.’”

Students participating in NCAA sports have a course load to balance on top of going to practice and games. To stay eligible they must earn at least 6 hours each term and meet the minimum grade-point average requirements for their school’s graduation GPA standards, as per NCAA eligibility regulations. Since games will soon be played on the opposite side of the country, travel times will be higher and the athletes will miss more school.

Principal Andy Baxa, a passionate fan of his alma mater, Texas Tech, already sees the added travel as being an issue for students. Being principal, and formerly assistant principal, he has first-hand experience with how schedules can affect students.

With volleyball having around 30 games a season and baseball having over 50, athletes are constantly having to go to and from games. For Baxa, it’s hard to imagine an even tighter schedule being conducive to student-athletes’ learning.

“Now you’re going to have baseball games that are played in the middle of the week or basketball games played in the middle of the week where a student has to go to the West Coast [from the East Coast],” Baxa said. “It’s just sad. That’s a lot of travel, a lot of time away, and if the main thing is that they’re student-athletes, when do they get time to be a student if they’re missing half their classes during the season?”

However, according to Baxa, profit is a major motive for colleges to make moves since some conferences are able to provide more lucrative deals. Being able to earn tens of millions of dollars, for new TV and media deals, more by simply switching to another conference is a big factor in schools’ decisions for Baxa.

“It’s hard to say you should stay put where you are whenever you’re going to turn down 30, 40 extra million dollars a year,” Baxa said.

When fans go to games they want to be able to cheer on their teams, participate in decades-old traditions, and play in long-standing rivalries. The addition of schools to conferences could potentially eliminate some of these aspects of college sports.

“It just makes me sad whenever you start seeing the loss of some of your traditional rivalries and your traditions that have really made college football so much more fun to watch than pro football,” Baxa said.

Some of the rivalries lost include the UCLA vs. Cal game, known as the “Bear Bowl”, and the Washington vs. Washington State game, also called the “Apple Cup”. There is also a headline rivalry that will start up again, Texas vs. Texas A&M.

But shaking up conferences means that teams that aren’t normally in the limelight could get more publicity by being in a higher profile conference or playing bigger opponents.

Freshman Fletcher Vandegrift sees the changes as an opportunity for smaller schools to get more recognition. He said that with lesser-known colleges moving to bigger conferences they will have a better chance to compete for titles.

“Some schools are now gonna have the opportunity to go to the college football playoffs that we just haven’t been paying attention to,” Vandegrift said. “I think that it’s great for [smaller teams] now that they’re finally getting a chance to play some better teams and starting to beat them.”

Next time you plan to watch your team play or are looking at stats compared to the rest of their conference, make sure you know which conference that actually is.

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